3. Investing in resilience today reduces costs tomorrow

Why investing in resilience makes sense

The evidence clearly shows that proactive investment in resilience makes financial and societal sense, especially when considering the cost of risk, disaster, and safeguarding resources. The exact return on an investment can vary by sector and context. Beyond ensuring adequate disaster management and preparedness, investment in resilience can generate wide-ranging dividends—supporting development, strengthening institutions, improving public health, protecting ecosystems, preventing conflict, and enabling more stable and equitable societies. Despite these clear benefits, resilience investment remains underdeveloped. Short- term incentives, inadequate metrics, and institutional inertia all work against resilience financing. Economic frameworks often overlook natural and social capital. To understand why investment in resilience is important, it is essential to clarify what kind of “value” is at stake and how conventional measures often obscure the true returns resilience has to offer (see Box 2). Tackling these barriers is the key to unlocking the full potential of investing in resilience.

Protecting what matters, restoring what is lost, and creating what is needed

Investment in resilience primarily works to safeguard and restore value. It helps societies, economies, and ecosystems cope with shocks and disruptions. From a degraded baseline, it restores value by repairing natural and social capital that underpin prosperity. When business-as-usual is no longer viable, resilience investment can also create new forms of value—not by preserving the old system, but by enabling transformative shifts to more just and sustainable ones. Clarifying these pathways to change is essential, since resilience is not just about coping with shocks and bouncing back, but also about adapting and transforming (see Must-Know #2).

Triple dividends: avoid losses, grow economies, strengthen societies

Resilience investment offers a “triple dividend.” First, it helps lower the cost of a disruptive event. Investing in advance can prevent crises from escalating and reduce the damage and disruption when disasters or conflicts occur. Second, investment can stimulate economic growth. By lowering risk and strengthening institutions and infrastructures, resilience investment can create the positive conditions necessary for encouraging growth and development. Third, resilience investment can help to deliver social and environmental benefits, including improved public health, increased biodiversity, strengthened social cohesion, and enhanced well-being across communities. Despite these self-evidently positive returns, the actual financial, ecological, and social gains from resilience investment have been poorly measured. Neither policy nor financial circles have yet provided robust figures for the potential savings a resilience investment might generate, thus perpetuating the false perception that an investment in resilience is likely to cost more than it is worth (see Box 2). The reality is likely the precise opposite.

Economic benefits

Resilience investment reduces the cost of disasters, conflicts, and climate shocks. For example, every dollar spent on disaster risk reduction and conflict prevention has been shown to save many times more in avoided recovery costs. However, more than reducing losses and costs, resilience investment can open pathways for adaptation and transformation. Investment can support the transition towards more just and sustainable systems. For instance, investing in renewable energy is not only a way to safeguard economies against volatile fossil fuel markets. It can also be a step towards a transformative low- carbon energy future. Similarly, investments in sustainable food systems or nature-positive solutions simultaneously improve food security, strengthen ecosystems, and open new economic opportunities.

Social benefits

Resilience investment generates vital social benefits. It protects communities from the impacts of climate change, conflict, and disasters and reduces the risks to lives, health, and well-being. By strengthening institutions and community networks, investment builds trust, social cohesion, cooperation, and the capacity to navigate uncertainty together. For example, equitable water management and inclusive urban planning not only protect vulnerable populations from harm but also create the opportunity for fairer, healthier, safer, and more cohesive societies. In this way, resilience is not only about coping but also about addressing inequality and opening the door for justice-oriented transformations (see Must-Know #9). However, resilience investment does not operate in a sociopolitical vacuum. Without an equity lens, an investment could run the risk of RESILIENCE SCIENCE MUST-KNOWS reproducing existing injustices or even creating new ones. Inclusive governance mechanisms and paying attention to power dynamics are essential if resilience investment is to benefit everyone and not simply to reinforce unequal systems (see Must-Know #7, #8, and #9).

A healthy planet: a precondition for economic and social benefits

Investing in resilience benefits the environment. Investment supports land management and conservation, protects biodiversity, and restores lost natural diversity. It enhances vital ecosystem services like water purification, pollination, and flood control. Investment also bolsters sustainable agriculture and forestry, reducing environmental degradation and promoting carbon sequestration. Sinking money into the natural world quickly ripples out into other social and economic benefits. Human activity is embedded in, and depends upon, the Earth’s biosphere, itself the bedrock of civilisation. A healthy planet is not optional; it is a precondition for economic development, social justice, and sustainability.